personalStudio: Clipping techniques

There are many ways to edit, shorten, lengthen, move, and crop the beginnings or ends of video clips in Adamation’s personalStudio. While it’s possible to do some tasks by dragging clips around in the filmstrip, you’ll get the best performance, the most accuracy, and fastest edits by mastering the controls on the Clip Edit tab, which let you precisely control in-points and out-points for any selected clip.

While the functions of the Clip Edit tab are documented, its basic concepts may be unfamiliar if you haven’t done much NLE (non-linear editing) work before. Mastering the Clip Edit tab will make your work in personalStudio much easier and smoother.

Editing can be done either in Program mode or in Source mode. The latter lets you work with the clip as a piece of raw media, unencumbered by the rest of the project. Some of the Clip Edit controls are disabled when in Source mode, by logical necessity.

Each of the four main buttons specifies the type of action to be performed on the currently selected clip at the currently selected point in time.

Stretch
Clip Front Clip Back
Shift

These are mode buttons, not action buttons. Clicking one of them does not cause anything to happen; it only sets a “state” for personalStudio so it will know how to behave when you click one of the InPoint or OutPoint buttons, which do the actual moving, clipping, and trimming.

Time Shifting

Let’s say you want to move a clip backwards or forward in time. If you want to move it to a position after or before another clip on the same layer, drag it to the new relative position in the Storyboard. If you want to keep it between the same two clips but need it to start a few seconds earlier, do this:

Select the clip (either on the Storyboard or on the Filmstrip).

Scrub to the exact point in time where you want the clip to start.

In Clip Edit, click the lower button (the Shift button).

Click the In Point button to make the beginning of that clip equal the currently selected point in time.

If you want the clip to end rather than to begin at the selected time, click the Out Point button instead. This will cause the end of the selected clip to occur at the currently selected point in time.

Trim the Beginning or End of a Clip

Select the clip.

Find the point in the clip where the edit should end. In other words, scrub to the first frame of video after the stuff you want to delete. Use the Frame Forward button to inch forward one frame at a time until you find the exact spot.

Click the Clip Front button on the Clip Edit tab.

Click the In Point button. This tells personalStudio to make the current point in time the new beginning time for this clip. In other words, it deletes (or, rather, hides) everything that comes before the current time point.

Because you’ve clipped the front of a clip rather than the back, the newly created blank space is not automatically deleted. To correct for this, scrub to the last frame of the previous clip and use the Time Shifting technique above.

To trim the end of the clip, use the same technique but use the Clip Back and Out Point buttons instead.

The Stretch mode button in Clip Edit works with the same principles, but should be reserved for use with still images or titles. Stretching video requires interpolation of data and the results will not be good on your final rendering. However, you can get some interesting effects by shrinking video clips in Stretch mode (though the audio will get weird; you’ll want to mute the audio on that clip and overlay some other music or sound effect to compensate).